Dozens of passengers line up in single file along the platform in the dead of night, ready to gather their luggage and pile into the ageing railway carriages.

At the small railway station in Nampula, in northeastern Mozambique, the 4:00 a.m. train to Cuamba in the north west is more than full, as it is every day, to the detriment of those slow to board and forced to stand.

In recent years, the government in Maputo has made developing the train network a priority as part of its economic plan.

But mounting public debt has meant that authorities had no choice but to cede control of the project to the private sector.

Seconds before the train — six passenger coaches coupled between two elderly US-made locomotives — leaves Nampula station, the platforms are already entirely empty.

No one can afford to be late.

Inside, the carriages remain pitch dark until the sun rises as the operator has not installed any lighting.

A blast of the horn and the sound of grinding metal marks the train’s stately progress along the 350-kilometre (220-mile) line to Cuamba — more than 10 hours away.

Five or six passengers cram onto benches intended for four without a murmur of complaint.

“The train is always full,” said Argentina Armendo, his son kneeling down nearby.

“Lots of people stay standing. Even those who have a ticket can’t be sure of getting on. They should add some coaches!”

‘Enormous growth potential’

“Yes, but it’s not expensive,” insists the conductor Edson Fortes, cooly. “It’s the most competitive means of transport for the poor. With the train, they are able to travel.”

Sitting in a vast, ferociously air-conditioned office Mario Moura da Silva, the rail operations manager for CDN, the company operating the line, appears more concerned about passenger numbers as a measure of success than perhaps their comfort.

In 2017, its trains carried almost 500,000 — a 265-percent increase on a year earlier.

“Passenger traffic isn’t profitable but it’s a requirement of the contract with the government,” said Moura da Silva.

“It’s not that which earns us money, it’s more the retail,” he added, referring to the company’s commercial operation, which has grown by 65 percent in a year.

Brazilian mining giant Vale, which owns CDN along with Japanese conglomerate Mitsui, began its Mozambican rail venture in 2005.

Having won a contract to run the concession from the government, it restored the former colonial line, which linked its inland coal mines with the port at Nacala.

It now operates a network of 1,350 kilometres (840 miles) following an investment of nearly $5 billion (around 4 billion euros).

“The growth potential is enormous,” said Moura da Silva.

Rail corridors

Mozambique’s government is eyeing the project as a bellwether for the industry.

“We have made infrastructure one of our four investment priorities,” said Transport Minister Carlos Fortes Mesquita.

“Thanks to this investment, the country recorded a strong growth in the railway sector.”

Eight new “rail corridor” projects are now under way in Mozambique, all funded with private capital, as the state grapples with a long-standing cash shortage.

The government has been engulfed in a scandal linked to secret borrowing by the treasury, which is juggling debt amounting to 112 percent of GDP.

As a result, a handful of large companies, attracted by Mozambique’s vast mineral wealth, have taken the lead in developing the country’s rail infrastructure.

But it is unclear if their interest in the sector will continue in the long-term.

Until the coal runs out?

“Today the Nacala line only exists because of coal. But once the mine closes, who will be able to justify continuing operations?” asked Benjamin Pequenino, an economist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

“The private sector won’t continue to invest if it knows it will lose money,” he said.

But in the absence of any alternative, former parliament speaker Abdul Carimo accepts that public-private partnerships are the least worst option.

Carimo, who remains close to the ruling party, now heads up the “Zambezi Development Corridor”.

The scheme is managed by Thai group, ITD, and plans to build 480 kilometres of track between Macuse port and the coal mines at Moatize for a price tag of $2.3 billion.

Carimo, who closely follows developments on the project, has vowed that “his” line will not only be used to carry minerals but will stimulate activity across the region it serves.

“I hate coal but I want this infrastructure to relaunch agriculture in Zambezi province,” he said, adding that the region was “one of the richest in the country in the 1970s.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The second annual March for Science was held on the National Mall in Washington Saturday and more than 200 similar events were held around the world.

Thousands of people attended the flagship event in Washington, but the turnout was notably smaller than last year.

Saturday’s march took place after a turbulent year in science policy under the Trump administration.  Science-related changes from the White House have included the withdrawal of the U.S. from the global Paris Agreement on climate change and the president’s championing of coal-fired power plants.  Washington is also seeking to roll back environmental regulations.  

One of the demonstrators carried a sign that said “Make America Smart Again” — a play on the president’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again.”

“Science is what separates facts from fallacies, falsehoods and fanaticism,” David Titley, a retired rear admiral told the crowd in Washington.  Titley who led the U.S. Navy’s task force on climate change said, “If we ignore and denigrate science we do so at our own peril.”

.

But march organizers say the attacks on science did not start with the Trump administration. For decades, they say ideology has overtaken evidence on issues in women’s health, gun violence and other controversial subjects.

“This isn’t a new phenomenon,” March for Science Interim Executive Director Caroline Weinberg said recently. “We reached a tipping point. But these protests should have been happening for years.”

In a polarized country, however, the march walks a fine line.

This year, March for Science organizers rallied support to lift a ban on gun violence research.

Weinberg said they debated whether the issue was too partisan for the group to weigh in on.

But they decided that it was more important to support research that would help policymakers make good decisions.

“It’s only partisan because we’ve let that become the conversation,” she said. “Pushing against that, I think, is one of the most vital roles we can play.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Betty Rosenbaum was only 2 years old when her mother and brother were sent to a concentration camp in eastern Poland in 1943. She never saw them again. Today, a new digital exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, features a treasured letter her mother wrote to her more than 75 years ago. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Auntie Caterina is a regular taxi driver, who offers free rides to cancer patients in the Italian city of Florence. She inherited the taxi when her partner died of cancer 17 years ago and says this is a way to honor his legacy. To show gratitude and support of the Tuscany Region, she was recognized for her work last month as its “Solidarity Ambassador”. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Two recent Western films on Russia, one a Hollywood spy thriller, the other an independent historical satire, depict the country’s dark political underbelly. How much of that portrayal is an exaggeration for entertainment’s sake and how much is a take from reality? Experts and filmmakers say it’s a little bit of both. VOA’s Penelope Poulou set out to find out.
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From: MeNeedIt

Milos Forman, the Czech-born movie director who found fame in Hollywood with the Oscar-winning classics One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus has died at the age of 86, Czech news agency CTK reported Saturday.

Forman died Friday in the United States after a short illness, his wife, Martina, told CTK.

“His departure was calm and he was surrounded the whole time by his family and his closest friends,” she said.

Forman was born in the Czech town of Caslav on Feb. 18, 1932, but moved to the United States after the Communist crackdown on the “Prague Spring” uprising in 1968. He became a U.S. citizen in the 1970s.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which a psychiatric institution becomes a microcosm of the contemporary world, and Amadeus, the life of 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart through the eyes of his rival Antonio Salieri, earned 13 Oscars between them, including those for best director to Forman.

His other notable work included the rock musical Hair in 1979, Ragtime in 1981 and The People vs Larry Flint in 1996, which was nominated for an Academy Award that year.
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From: MeNeedIt

A key decision on whether to place a $1.4 billion telescope in Hawaii to further astronomy research has been delayed, leaving open the possibility the project may be moved to Spain, a panel said Friday.

The board of governors for the project dubbed the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory still wants to build the telescope on its preferred site of Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaii.

But an alternative location in Spain’s Canary Islands remains under consideration, the board said in a statement after meeting this week to discuss legal and regulatory challenges to the Hawaii telescope plan that could last years.

“We continue to assess the ongoing situation as we work toward a decision,” said Ed Stone, the executive director of the observatory.

He said no decision could be made on where to put the telescope “until we have a place to go, and we don’t decide when we have a place to go — that’s decided by the courts and agencies.”

Dormant volcano

The 30-meter (98 feet) diameter telescope would be placed on one side of Mauna Kea and is far more advanced than the world’s largest current telescopes that measure 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. The new telescope could potentially allow scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries about black holes, exoplanets, celestial bodies, and even detect indications of life on other planets. 

Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano and Hawaii’s tallest mountain, was selected in July 2009 as the target location for the telescope after a five-year search.

Scientists called it the best site in the world for astronomy, given a stable, dry, and cold climate, which allows for sharp images. The atmosphere over the mountain also provides favorable conditions for astronomical measurements, according to the TMT website.

The island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, which already has an astronomical observatory, is considered a viable alternative. But scientists have said the telescope’s design would have to be altered for more adaptive optics given the mountain site’s lower altitude and different climate. That means it would take scientists more time to achieve the same discoveries they could make at Mauna Kea, Stone said.

Years of debate

The Hawaii site has been subject to years of public debate and legal challenges. Researchers say it will help usher in scientific and economic developments, while opponents maintain it will hurt the environment and desecrate land considered sacred by some Native Hawaiians. Mauna Kea already houses a number of high-powered telescopes at its summit. 

“Thirty years of astronomy development has resulted in adverse significant impact to the natural and cultural resources of Mauna Kea,” said Kealoha Pisciotta, president of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, an indigenous, Native Hawaiian group that works on environmental issues. “Trying to build more would have added to the cumulative impact.” 

On Thursday, the Hawaii Senate approved a bill to ban new construction atop Mauna Kea, and included a series of audits and other requirements before the ban could be lifted. But House leaders said they don’t have plans to advance the bill. Democratic House Speaker Scott Saiki told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the “bill is dead on arrival in the House.” 

There are also two appeals before the Hawaii Supreme Court. One challenges the sublease and land use permit issued by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources. The other has been brought by a Native Hawaiian man who says use of the land interferes with his right to exercise cultural practices and is thus entitled to a case hearing. 

The telescope project is a collaboration among universities in the U.S. and California, including the University of Hawaii and national science and research institutes of Japan, China, and India. 

“It’s a privilege to practice astronomy on Mauna Kea and we’re not satisfied with where we’re at right now,” Dan Meisenzahl, a spokesperson for the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. “We will continue to push ourselves to improve our stewardship of the mountain.” 

 AP-WF-04-13-18 2343GMT
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From: MeNeedIt

Scientists will leave their labs and march on Washington and more than 200 other cities around the world Saturday, protesting government policies on issues from climate change to gun violence that they say ignore scientific evidence.

It comes a year after the first March for Science, three months into the Trump administration, when researchers feared that science would be pushed aside in the new president’s zeal to eliminate government regulations.

WATCH: Rough Year in Science Policy Brings Researchers Back to March

This year, “I think our worst fears are coming to fruition,” said Chris Zarba, who retired in February as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board staff office. Those panels evaluate the evidence guiding decisions on government environmental regulations.

EPA woes

Last October, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive that changed the rules governing membership on those panels.

Pruitt barred researchers who had received EPA grants. He said agency funding could compromise their objectivity.

“Whatever science comes out of EPA shouldn’t be political science,” Pruitt said in a statement. “From this day forward, EPA advisory committee members will be financially independent from the agency.”

But scientists with funding from the industries EPA regulates are not held to the same standard, Zarba said.

“Nobody believes now that those panels are independent,” he added.

As the Trump administration undoes what it calls job-killing regulations on climate change, air and water pollution, pesticides and more, Zarba said industry has a voice but science does not.

“Human health and the environment will suffer,” he said.

It’s one reason Zarba said he would be marching Saturday.

Politics and science

But march organizers say the attacks on science did not start with the Trump administration. For decades, they say, ideology has overtaken evidence on issues in women’s health, gun violence and other controversial subjects.

“This isn’t a new phenomenon,” said March for Science Interim Executive Director Caroline Weinberg. “We reached a tipping point. But these protests should have been happening for years.”

In a polarized country, however, the march walks a fine line. 

“I’m always cautious about trying to politicize something as important as science,” said Rob Young, director for the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

“Certainly, scientists have had a rough go for the last year,” he added, and a march advocating for science is fine. “But to the extent that that’s incorporated with political messages, or slings and arrows against the president or members of his administration, then that’s a little bit more problematic.”

​Fired up

It’s Trump administration policies that have scientists fired up, however, from withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement to loosening air and water pollution rules.

“There’s no question that there’s fear and anxiety, given the elections of 2016,” said Chris McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, the professional society representing Earth and space scientists. 

She said that in the eight years she has been with AGU, it has become easier to get members to speak up on policy issues. 

“What we’re seeing is scientists coming to us to want to engage,” McEntee said.

More members are writing letters to elected officials and getting training on communicating science to policymakers and the public, she said. New programs AGU launched to help scientists communicate are overflowing.

And they are scoring some victories. Science agencies got a raise in the latest federal budget. 

“It’s been a very long time, actually, since we had significant increases,” McEntee noted.

New issues

Scientists are wading into controversial issues that many had previously avoided.

This year, March for Science organizers rallied support to lift a ban on gun violence research. Weinberg said they debated whether the issue was too partisan for the group to weigh in on. But they decided that it was more important to support research that would help policymakers make good decisions.

“It’s only partisan because we’ve let that become the conversation,” she said. “Pushing against that, I think, is one of the most vital roles we can play.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Nonprofit international organization for public competitions XPRIZE has announced 10 finalists in its race to develop new technologies to lower carbon-dioxide emissions. Each team will get an additional incentive of $5 million to scale up their ideas and present them for the top prize of $20 million. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

After weeks of railing against online shopping giant Amazon, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a task force to study the United States Postal System.

In the surprise move, Trump said that USPS is on “an unsustainable financial path” and “must be restructured to prevent a taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The task force will be assigned to study factors including its pricing in the package delivery market and will have 120 days to submit a report with recommendations.

The order does not specifically mention Amazon or it owner, Jeff Bezos. But Trump has been criticizing the company for months, accusing it of not paying its fair share of taxes, harming the postal service, and putting brick-and-mortar stores out of business. Trump has also gone after Bezos personally and accused The Washington Post, which he owns, of being Amazon’s “chief lobbyist.”

The U.S. Postal Service has indeed lost money for years, but package delivery has actually been a bright spot for the service.

Boosted by e-commerce, the Postal Service has enjoyed double-digit revenue increases from delivering packages. That just hasn’t been enough to offset pension and health care costs as well as declines in first-class letters and marketing mail, which together make up more than two-thirds of postal revenue.

Still, Trump’s claim the service could be charging more may not be entirely far-fetched. A 2017 analysis by Citigroup concluded that the Postal Service, which does not use taxpayer money for its operations, was charging below market rates as a whole on parcels. Still, federal regulators have reviewed the Amazon contract with the Postal Service each year, and deemed it to be profitable.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

China’s exports growth unexpectedly fell in March, raising questions about the health of one of the economy’s key growth drivers even as trade tensions rapidly escalate with the United States.

March import growth beat expectations, however, suggesting its domestic demand may still be solid enough to cushion the blow from any trade shocks.

That left China with a rare trade deficit for the month, also the first drop since last February.

The latest readings on the health of China’s trade sector follow weeks of tit-for-tat tariff threats by Washington and Beijing, sparked by U.S. frustration with China’s massive bilateral trade surplus and intellectual property policies, that have fueled fears of a global trade war.

China’s March exports fell 2.7 percent from a year earlier, lagging analysts’ forecasts for a 10 percent increase, and down from a sharper-than-expected 44.5 percent jump in February, which economists believe was heavily distorted by seasonal factors.

For the first quarter as a whole, exports still grew a hefty 14.1 percent.

Stronger currency

Some analysts had expected a pullback in March exports following an unusually strong start to the year, when firms stepped up shipments before the long Lunar New Year holiday in mid-February. That scenario did not alter their view that global demand remains robust.

But a stronger currency could also be starting to erode Chinese exporters’ competitiveness. The yuan appreciated around 3.7 percent against the U.S. dollar in the first quarter this year, on top of a 6.6 percent gain last year.

No hard timeline has been set by either Washington or Beijing for the actual imposition of tariffs, which leaves the door open to negotiations and a possible compromise that could limit the damage to both sides.

But with the threat of tariffs hanging over nearly a third of China’s exports to the United States, analysts say its companies and their U.S. customers may try to front-load shipments before any measures kick in.

China’s exports to the U.S. rose 14.8 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, while imports rose 8.9 percent.

That sent its quarterly trade surplus with the U.S. surging 19.4 percent to $58.25 billion, though the March reading narrowed to $15.43 billion from $20.96 billion in February.

China’s total aluminum exports in March rose to their highest since June, just as the United States imposed a 10 percent tariff on imports of the metal on March 23 along with a 25 percent duty on steel imports.

Outlook cloudy

China’s exports rode a global trade boom last year, expanding at the fastest pace since 2013 and serving as one of the key drivers behind the economy’s forecast-beating expansion.

But the sudden spike in trade tensions with the United States is clouding the outlook for both China’s “old economy” heavy industries and “new economy” tech firms.

Washington says China’s $375 billion trade surplus with the United States is unacceptable, and has demanded Beijing reduce it by $100 billion immediately.

In a move to further force China to lower the trade surplus running with the U.S., Trump unveiled tariff representing about $50 billion of technology, transport and medical products early this month, drawing an immediate threat of retaliatory action from Beijing.

China’s tech sector, which is key part of Beijing’s longer-term “Made in China 2025” strategy to move from cheap goods to higher-value manufacturing, may be particularly vulnerable.

High-tech products have been among its fastest growing export segments. China exported $137.8 billion worth of high-tech products in the first quarter, up 20.5 percent on-year.
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From: MeNeedIt

The World Trade Organization predicts continued trade growth this year, though it warns that tensions and “tit-for-tat” retaliatory measures, notably between the U.S. and China, could compromise those projections.

WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo laid out the trade body’s predictions at a news conference Thursday amid concerns about a trade war over U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs on Chinese and other goods and Beijing’s retaliation.

As it stands, the forecast is for 4.4 percent growth in merchandise trade volumes in 2018, easing to 4 percent next year. That’s down from 4.7 percent in 2017.

The WTO is pointing to “broadly positive signs” in world trade but says they face headwinds from “a rising tide of anti-trade sentiment and the increased willingness of governments to employ restrictive trade measures.”
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From: MeNeedIt